Fairies and Wolfe

Gerry Quinn · 31 Mar 2012, 18:37 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 19:37:01 +0100
Subject: (urth) Fairies and Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W27568AA533983B474DCDF0CF4E0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W27568AA533983B474DCDF0CF4E0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <98517466FBA54BDBA6944938B4DD4315@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> Juturna also mentions Baldanders a few times during the conversation and this (along with the
> Lake Diuturna/eel connections) is supposed to be enough for a reader to connect the dots and
> figure out the underwater breathing connection. Once again, I think Wolfe makes the puzzle a
> bit too difficult. I haven't seen the "mermaid's kiss" connection in any published scholarly
> analysis. I think it was figured out exclusively on this board and that within the past few
> years.

I don?t see any mystery about an ?underwater breathing connection?.  Juturna says out straight that Baldanders will eventually have to enter the water: presumably by the time he does, he will have arrange some way to respire.  Talos makes a reference to it somewhere too.  And of course we have seen mysterious ?scars? on his neck, so the obvious interpretation is that he has already fitted himself with gills.

> A debate on whether "magic" is used seems sophomoric. The conversation with The CUmaean and
> Merryn warns us against falling into that trap.  Magic is that which cannot be explained by 
> science.  And hopefully none is so narrow sighted as to think that science is the only possible 
> explanatory mechanism that will ever be available, be it the long ago past or far future. We 
> happen to live now in a time period which is the Age Of Science, but it seems obvious that will 
>not be the case forever.Some of the limitatons of science are already starting to show.

That is not at all what the conversation implies.  First Merryn points out that there is no magic, only technology.  The Cumaean then states that words are symbols, and either word might refer to the same thing.  But everywhere in this sequence it is made clear to us that advanced technology or scientific understanding are the basis for events.  Both the glamour placed on Jolenta and the raising of Apu-Punchau are described in such terms.

- Gerry Quinn

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